Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy

Never before has a VP of the USA been so influential and so power hungry. USA citizens should take heed. An intellectually challenged president manipulated by the VP. This is scary stuff!

Horrible. Disgusting. I was filled with repulsion to the depths of my being, in reading this book.

Savage makes an exquisite case. He goes through, point by point, in excellently written prose, showing all the ways that Bush and Cheney have subverted the constitution. He doesn't do this just referring to obscure aspects. He doesn't just present opinions. He looks at the core of the constitution, at the Separation of Powers, and how Bush Cheney et.al. have worked to remove that from the basis of our country. Savage gives a huge amount of meticulous evidence, albeit written in a style that makes it feel like a story.

But it is a story worthy of the great Shakespearean or Greek tragedies. This is not a case where Cheney made a mistake, or misunderstood something. He has been working since his time under Nixon to expand the power of the President. It's not just a case where there's a disagreement on the interpretation of the constitution. He truly believes that Congress should have no oversight over the President, that the President should make laws, and that this was what the Founding Fathers intended. Far worse, over the last seven years, he's enacted his beliefs, so that they are now the custom of the land.

And then it got worse. This belief on the independence of the President, the "Unitary Presidential Theory", is believed by only a small minority of scholars. Most think it only slightly better than the gift your dog gives you when you take it on a walk. (I'm sorry. That was unfair. Dogs leave behind far higher quality.) But now, two Supreme Court Justices were found to believe this idea as well. So Busheney have worked to undermine the future of our country as well, inserting their viscous beliefs into the very top of our court system, that they might slowly win others to their cult of power.

A friend counseled me not to read this book, for it would just make me angry. He was right. But I think we need to be aware of what's going on. Where we once had a country built on the rule of law, with at the time the finest document devoted to freedom and equality in history, we now have only tattered cloth and shattered dreams. We have two men ruling us, devoted to power and control, with no compassion within them. And we have decades ahead of us, to work to correct the destruction they have wrought on our country and the world. I do not believe in my life I have seen a greater example of what it means to be a traitor. If you can stomach it, read this book, to see the work ahead of us, and the shame we now collectively own. For I do not believe in my life I will see us truly healed from these past seven years.

Charlie Savage has addressed masterfully and objectively a Constitutional misstep of the utmost importance which transcends partisanship: the usurpation by the Bush-Cheney legal team of an unprecedented reservoir of power to be wielded selectively as relevant situations arise. As Savage points out, the roots of such an expansion of power far predate the accession of an utterly incompetent (and this is my judgment) president but rather to the experiences of Dick Cheney and David Addington during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, to Cheney's dissenting opinion in a House committee report during the Iran-Contra scandal, to the Korean War experiences of a young John Yoo, thousands of whose compatriots could have been spared had only the U.S. president been freer to conduct the nation's foreign policy as he saw fit, to the inception in the Ed Meese Justice Department of signing statements as a means for the president's establishment of greater control over the "Unitary Executive Branch." These were men with an AGENDA, and the point Savage drives home mercilessly is that Bush-Cheney's freehandedness in appointing individuals with views correlative to the administration's own and manipulation of the Office of Legal Counsel as mechanism to bind the executive branch to a pliant group of lawyer's expansive views of presidential power has eroded the checks and balances that have served us well for over two centuries. As an Amazon user, I feel obliged to play my part in the backlash against the notion that the upper echelon of the Executive Branch is a suitable arena for the drawing of dangerous and ideologically reprehensible conclusions and the mindless appointing of individuals to positions with the legal power and public authority to corroborate those conclusions. Bravo, Mr. Savage.

Charlie Savage has done an invaluable service in examining the Bush administration's attempts to augment executive power and effectively neuter the legislative and executive branches. The central villain in this tale is Vice President Dick Cheney. Savage documents Cheney's career as a staffer in the Nixon and Ford administrations, then as a Senator, Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, and finally as VP. In all of these various capacities Cheney has been an ardent advocate of expanding presidential power.

Savage also does a good job of analyzing the legal arguments that have been proposed to justify the expansion of executive power. Chief among these legal theories is the unitary executive, which holds that the president should have unfettered control over the activities of the executive branch and that the Congress should be limited in its oversight responsibilities. The unitary executive theory is a fringe philosophy among constitutional scholars, yet the Bush administration packed its staff with adherents to this marginal view. Chief among these was John Yoo, a controversial constitutional scholar who was given virtually unchecked powers to craft the administration's legal justification for its activities in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Savage discusses the various policy areas under which the administration has tried to expand its power. One of the recurrent subjects throughout the book is the Bush administration's creation of military commissions under which suspected terrorists are held indefinitely and not allowed to see the evidence that is being used against them. Another area is the administration's attempts to define the interrogation techniques that will be used on prisoners, in which it has consistently ignored the objections of JAG officers, as well as the program that was set up without Congressional authorization enabling the administration to wiretap the telephone calls of American citizens without warrants. He also also has a separate chapter on the administration's use of presidential signing statements, which enable the president to single out sections of bills that should not be implemented. He then looks at the recent Supreme Court appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and how they have consistently been unequivocal supporters of expanded presidential power. Finally, he looks at how the administration packed the Justice Department and other agencies with ideologically likeminded political appointees, and gave those appointees the responsibility for new hires.

I should point out, that while Savage is clearly no fan of the Bush administration, his overall argument is decidedly non-partisan. He provides a historical overview of how various post-war adminstrations have tried to expand presidential power, and makes clear that Democratic administrations have been just as assertive in this area. He argues that the Republican-led Congress delegated unprecedented powers to Bush at their own peril, because any Democratic president that comes to power in the near future will be able to exploit this authority. Overall, Savage presents a passionate, clear, well-informed intellectual critique of excessive presidential power in general, and he argues convincingly that Americans of all political persuasions should be alarmed by what the current administration as done in this area.

I have just about everything written on the current Bush administration and found a few nuggets in this book that I was unaware of. The cunning and patience of these fascists are the only thing I can find commendable about Bush & Co. Their mission is the end of our democracy - plain and simple and this book is a great place to start if trying to view the multi-decade agenda of these fiends. A good read.